25

SAFE MOOR’D

1820–40

IN THE autumn of 1838 an old hulk passed up the Thames to Rotherhithe on her final voyage – not under sail but steam, pulled by a pair of ‘tuggers’ to Beatson’s breakers yard. A year later J. M. W. Turner unveiled a portrayal of the moment, rich with artistic licence; the hulk is seen as a noble old three-decker with her masts standing, when in reality they had already been stripped; and she is being carried off in her ghostly shimmering grandeur by a single, dark and dwarfish vessel under a cloud of fiery steam. The painting voted Britain’s most loved work of art is heavy with metaphor; a white flag of surrender flies aloft; the heroic age is being consigned to history by technology.

Turner’s Fighting Temeraire contains another symbolic touch which tends to be overlooked. The observer is seeing the passing not just of sailing ships but of those who worked them. And as well as glory at Trafalgar, the Temeraire exemplified Jack’s travails against a system that decorated him with praise yet was savage in punishment and miserly with reward. The grand old 98 is remembered for coming gallantly to the rescue of Nelson’s Victory at Trafalgar. The outrage of 1802, deplored as ‘one of the most fatal blots on our naval annals’ – the hanging of a dozen men from the yards ‘on which they had so lately and gallantly served’ – is forgotten.

So, had all the effusion – about ‘brave Jack’, or ‘honest Tar’ – had it all been a sham? In the poorhouses and from parish dependants up and down the land, many a heartfelt Aye would have been heard. Lost seamen were publicly visible enough to anger campaigners like George ‘Bosun’ Smith, a sailor himself before he was seized with Baptist fervour. Of stentorian voice and ‘oceanic tempestuous nature’, Smith had frequent run-ins with the authorities while lobbying for naval reform. But it was the blight of poverty that moved him to his greatest labours: a fund for shipwrecked and distressed men and their families in 1824; and founding the Destitute Sailors’ Asylum in London in 1827. The ‘Bosun’s’ zeal did not stop there. With a crew of boys in nautical outfits singing hymns, he helped to found a refuge for seamen’s orphans and another for repentant Polls. Unfortunately, his dedication was not matched by management skills and four times he ended up in a debtors’ prison; he won prominent supporters, including naval officers such as Captain George Gambier, only to fall out with most of them. But Smith was a seaman who made an outstanding contribution to the welfare of old shipmates.1

That many remained in acute need was recorded by the journalist Henry Mayhew. A solicitor’s son but a chaotic boy, Mayhew ran away to sea at twelve and made a single voyage to India before returning to London where ‘shipwrecks [had] got so common in the streets that people didn’t care for them’.^*

Among the shipwrecks was one John Roome, found ‘crying watercress and herrings’ on a street in Blackfriars’ in the 1840s. Roome had been Victory’s signalman at Trafalgar, had raised the flags that informed every hand what England expected of them that day.² He was now broken, destitute and, at sixty-eight, near the end of his life.

This account would have been the richer for evidence from those who felt betrayed, those who ‘having been sucked like oranges, were thrown into the gutter like the peel’.³ Yet the voices we do have, ranging from William Spavens to William Richardson, speak with a common characteristic – pride. And warfare had been their binding mechanism. It is no coincidence that from 1740 Britain had been at war for thirty-seven of the years up to Waterloo. In her account of the forging of Britain, Linda Colley sees the wars with France as having had the support, broadly speaking, of the entire nation. ‘For all classes and for both sexes, patriotism was more often than not a highly rational response and a creative one as well. Patriotism in the sense of identification with Britain served . . . as a bandwagon on which different groups and interests leaped so as to steer it in a direction that would benefit them.’ Being a patriot, as she says, was a means of gaining a much broader access to citizenship.4 Still more so was this in Jack’s case. What may now be thought patronizing clichés, like ‘honest Tar’, were at the time badges of status. He had been the nation’s survival mechanism, and over a century of wars from which no generation was exempt had prized his honour in a way that left little room for ambivalence.

As to whether seafaring contributed to the creation of a national identity, the evidence is mixed. Scots, the third-largest contingent on the lower deck, had invested as boldly and devotedly in British patriotism as the English and Welsh. Ireland’s incorporation into a United Kingdom by the Act of Union in 1800 and Catholic Emancipation in 1829 could never really shake the identity of a separate island, and, as we have seen, Irish hands, the second-largest group, retained nationalist instincts which had led to significant rebellions. A seaman named George Watson, English himself, saw them as enduringly distinctive components of the lower deck:

The Irish are daringly bold and impetuous but need to be led. They are generous and kind-hearted when they are at peace, but the turbulent passions in them often cause them to violate every tie of friendship. The Scot is sullenly brave and proud of the memory of his ancestors. He fights to maintain their ancient glories . . . In battle a lion or a vulture, but when victory crowns his arms he becomes a lamb or a dove. John Bull is a mixture of both . . . resolute and coolly courageous . . . but he has prudence enough not to urge an hopeless warfare and manly submits to his fate.⁵

For the survivors – and there were many – benefits were still to be had.

Navy hands made contributions throughout their service towards pension funds that provided for them in the event of disability, sickness or after long or distinguished service. These funds had been amalgamated in 1814 under the roof of the Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich, which sheltered a fixed number of in-pensioners and disbursed payments to a far larger number of out-pensioners with homes or families. That year 5,491 men aged between eighteen and seventy-four were registered as out-pensioners. In 1815 a further 7,596 were added to the list and in 1816 another 2,922. Following demobilization numbers continued to decline – to 2,166 in 1818 and 635 in 1820.6 A large majority were aged between thirty and fifty, but the youngest was seventeen, the oldest eighty-four. One seventy-three-year-old granted his pension in 1814 was still alive in 1821.⁷

These men received annual amounts ranging from £7 for, say, a damaged hand, to £16 for the loss of a leg. The latter figure was also paid to John Southey, who had ‘lost an eye and all his teeth’, and John Hancock, who was simply ‘worn out’.⁸ It was not until 1831 that clear rates of pay for disability were laid down:

An able seaman having lost two limbs or being otherwise so severely wounded as to require the care of some other person shall have from 1/6 to 2s a day; for less injury & not requiring care from 1/- to 1/6 a day . . . if able to contribute to some small degree of his livelihood, from 9d to 1/- a day.⁹

Generally pensions were for life, although the Admiralty seemingly wanted to reduce the dependency of those it had made alcoholics as payments for ‘diseased liver’ could be limited to three years. Out-pensions for lengthy or meritorious service were more generous: a typical intake of fifty-three men in the month of September 1815 were approved payments of between £12 and £21 for life.¹⁰ (By comparison, lieutenants received £50 a year, captains £80.)

More fortunate still was another category of pensioner.

John Roome, having been observed begging on the street in Blackfriars, was questioned by a local doctor who, informed that this dishevelled figure had been the Jack who hoisted the signal at Trafalgar, ‘could scarcely refrain from a demonstration of reverence towards the old embarrassed man who sat uneasily before me’.11 As it turned out, the doctor discovered the reason Roome had no pension was not down to neglect by the state, but because he had deserted from Victory. Presented with the facts, the Admiralty did the decent thing and granted Roome a place at Greenwich where he lived for a further thirteen years.

The Royal Naval Hospital beside the Thames was, in fact, no medical facility but the world’s most magnificent almshouse, a showpiece of English Renaissance architecture by Sir Christopher Wren, with facilities for up to 2,710 resident pensioners. The number of in-pensioners and the 21,260 out-pensioners registered between 1814 and 1820 are no grounds for complacency, set against the 140,000 hands who served at the height of the war. Still, those granted a berth at Greenwich received a blessing available to none others of the common order besides their smaller number of army equivalents at Chelsea. Nearby stood the school for the children of dead shipmates – those killed in action or disabled.

George King, a man of twenty-four years’ service with battle honours, joined about 300 old hands who presented themselves at the Admiralty on a winter’s day in 1832 in the hope of a Greenwich berth. Each came bearing a ‘ticket’, a certificate of his service, and, if he could, a letter of commendation from a former officer. Thirteen were accepted. King was among the hundreds to be dismissed. He was already an out-pensioner and for the time being he got by, his income supplemented by casual labour in and around Wapping – ‘two days’ work at St Katharines Dock just before Christmas Eve’. The next time, he was one of 100 men applying for nine places:

At eleven their lordships arrived . . . I did not expect to be admitted but one of the lords asked me my service and also my pension to which I answered him 24 years service and £16 pension when he ordered my ticket to be taken away and I was ordered into the outer office to sit down.12

At four o’clock that afternoon, King landed at Greenwich and entered the splendid sanctuary where he would spend the last fifteen years of his life.

The inhabitants were issued with a blue suit, a tricorn hat and four pairs of blue hose – a uniform, in effect, that foreshadowed the regime introduced for seamen in 1857, but which must have struck as odd a group of men who had dressed at sea in whatever slops were at hand. Paintings, lithographs and cartoons of Greenwich pensioners in their long coats and tricorn hats almost invariably include one figure with a wooden leg, and we may observe among their number our first storyteller, William Spavens, a pegleg himself, eulogizing the retreat where:

The park is delightful . . . the clothing for the pensioners comfortable, and the provision wholesome and plentiful; all of which conspire to render life, loaded with infirmities, tolerable if not happy in its decline, ‘when safe moor’d in Greenwich tier’.¹³

By all accounts, the ‘Greenwich Geese’ remained an awkward crew. The nickname is said to have been coined because of raids on a local farmer’s fowls. One pensioner was expelled after fathering his ninth illegitimate child in Greenwich.¹⁴ Another character who acquired a measure of fame was Arthur Hardy, who quitted the hospital ‘without leave’ three times, despite being a double amputee. Hardy was noted without irony in the hospital records as ‘R’, or run, in 1805, 1808 and 1811 – although he had lost both legs below the knee on the sloop Hawke. The third time he found another sanctuary, in Windsor, and remained there for sixteen years before writing to beg re-admission. He returned on Christmas Day, 1830, dying nine months later aged seventy-five.15 (As to the reasons for his ‘deserting’, it is possible that Hardy, like a number of other pensioners, did so to be reunited with family. Wives were not allowed to live at Greenwich, which explains why John Nicol did not apply for entry until after his wife died. By then, as we have seen, the Admiralty ruled that he had left it too long.)

Fights and drunkenness were more common transgressions and delinquents had to wear a yellow coat with red arms – a stigma that the pensioners turned to smart advantage. The hospital had started to attract visitors, and as most questioners’ interest related to Trafalgar, they would be directed for an answer to one of the yellow-coated ‘Canaries’ – he being described as a veteran who could give a dramatic first-hand account of those events for a small fee. The grateful visitors’ largesse would then be shared around.

Most hobby crafts at sea had a practical aspect, but scrimshaw, the engraving of whales’ teeth, was a decorative art.

What the pensioners made of their noble surroundings – Corinthian pilasters, cupolas and vestibules, not to mention canvases by Sir Peter Lely, Sir Godfrey Kneller and Thomas Gainsborough – is not recorded. On a practical level, four great buildings contained the wards housing typically between twenty and forty men. Each ward was divided into individual cabins which, with a bed, table and chair, afforded more private space than the occupant had ever enjoyed at sea. Rations were better too – beef three times a week, mutton twice, with pease soup and cheese the other two, plus drink in the form of four pints of small beer a day. (Agricultural and factory workers were doing well if they ate meat more than once a week.)16 Meals were taken in the most resplendent space of all – the Painted Hall, with its chiaroscuro ceiling The Triumph of Peace and Liberty over Tyranny by Sir James Thornhill. Although the diners may not have realized it, there in this grand allegorical work, among the kings and queens, the Greek and Roman gods, is one of their own. John Worley, admitted in 1705 and reputed to have been among the hospital’s most disruptive residents, gazed down with bearded, saint-like benevolence on his successors.

Other facilities included a library with more than 1,400 volumes and a bust of Charles Dibdin inscribed with lines from ‘Tom Bowling’. An officer resident noted with regret, however, that ‘few of the pensioners avail themselves of the privileges thus extended to them; not more than twenty or thirty [use] the library’. More common was it to find a group of Falstaffian figures, ‘as melancholy as a lugged bear’ after a night’s carouse.¹⁷

Of those lucky to be ‘safe moor’d in Greenwich tier’, George King perhaps found himself on a bench with another old hand, George Watson, two blue-coats, with clay pipes and stone beer flagons at hand.¹⁸ There one might say, ‘Tip us a yarn’, and accounts – of ships, of voyages, of wrecks, of shipmates and tyrants, mutinies and battles – would begin.

George King had been in the frigate Melpomene with the Baltic fleet off Finland in ’09 when volunteers were asked to come forward for a raid on Russian gunboats. They rowed several miles through the dark and seized the first boat before coming under point-blank fire. ‘The coxswain was close alongside of me,’ King related. ‘His head was blown clean off his shoulders, part of his head took off my hat, and his brains flew all over me.’ Another man, both legs severed, lay in the bottom of the boat, trying to open his knife ‘to cut his belly, but we took the knife from him’. He begged to be heaved overboard, then died.

Casualties were heavy – 54 of 270 volunteers from four ships killed or wounded. One Russian gunboat had been burned and six taken.19 When the smoke cleared, King recalled, ‘we commenced upon the grog and in less than an hour some of our chaps were singing one of Dibdin’s songs’. Back on Melpomene there was more grog:

The captain asked us if we could guess at our loss. We said no. He then ordered us a glass of grog each and the purser took us all down and gave us each a tumbler of Hollands gin. I drank it off and went and laid down in my berth under the table and was soon fast asleep.²⁰

Here George Watson picked up the thread, for he too had been on a cutting-out caper – in the year ’12 in the Adriatic. George was an unusual cove, something his fellows remarked on. He left a well-paid merchantman because he preferred the Navy, you see, had never been pressed and never left, right up to when Johnny Crapaud gave him a broadside. Navy ships were, well, so lively. Take the Eagle and her farmyard below where the livestock ‘were spared slaughter and had names given to them’:

There was Billy the goat, Jenny the cow, Tom the sheep, Jack the goose and many others; Jenny the cow, after being two years on board, ran dry, and therefore was killed; poor Tom the sheep was killed by lightening and I know not what became of Billy; as for Jack the goose, he saw them all out . . . he would come out of his coop and join the forecastlemen and seemed quite at home amongst them. This sociality of the goose made every body notice and some would exclaim in his perambulations, ‘Well done, Jack!’ ‘Bravo, old Turko!’²¹

Of Eagle’s captain, Charles Rowley, who once thrashed him with a stick, ordered him aloft, then gave him a dozen for good measure, Watson said: ‘There could not be a better commander when the ship was in port and duty done. You might indulge in every merriment and festivity with impecunity.’ After all, as he saw it, ‘there is such diversity of characters in a ship that it is necessary to deal harshly with some for the comfort and security of others’.22

Then came the night – 17 September it was – he volunteered for an operation to cut out enemy gunboats on the River Po. In barges, they raced upriver as Johnny opened fire. Coming up the side, George ‘felt the true ferocious characteristics of war fire my bosom, though in general I was naturally averse to it’ – and ran straight into an explosion of cannister shot from a gun a few feet away which hurled him and two others back into their boat. One ball ‘went through my right thigh, and shattered the bone just below the hip’:

The pain was not poignant, but a kind of indescribable sensation which benumbed me all over. I concluded from it, that to be shot dead would be a very easy way to be sent out of this world.²³

Watson spent months in a Malta hospital, then another two years at Plymouth. Laid up, his right leg useless and surrounded by nurses, he admitted to great frustration because he was ‘fond of the society of women’. That took him off to recall the devout harlots of Palermo ‘going on shore every morning to confess their sins’, and back on board, ‘at it again at night, as fresh as ever’.²⁴ Mind you, George went on, those Plymouth nurses with ‘several husbands’ at sea were also ‘exceedingly bold and audacious’:

I had a great deal to do to repulse the temptations I met with from these syrens.²⁵

He was a windy old cully, Watson, but he had a way with a story and held his listeners’ attention even when he started to explain how he came to God. Over those years in hospital, he related, he passed the time in writing and drawing, and helped one of the more virtuous nurses by sewing clothes for her son, which she repaid with flagons of wine. But for books there was only the Bible and, as he read, ‘gradually I got triumph over the follies of my youth and resolved if ever I reached home to be another man’. When a young fellow came to hospital after losing both his arms, Watson had another revelation:

I said to myself ‘Take a view of that poor youth and own that nothing ails thee!’ and cheerfully hopped about with my crutches.26

At this point he was inclined to quote lines he attributed to Milton’s Paradise Lost, which added a few words of his own but conveyed the general sense of the thing:

God, nor to time nor place doth pay respect, Unless holiness be there,

Or thither brought By those that frequent there.²⁷

George Watson was granted his berth for being crippled in action, George King for meritorious service. Both ‘rejoiced in the goodness of the Almighty’ for carrying them ‘through troubles and uncouth adventures’ to be Greenwich pensioners.

Images of these characters abounded, especially in caricature form – squiffy-eyed old soaks, lacking in teeth as well as the odd limb. A notable exception is John Burnet’s Greenwich Hospital and the Naval Heroes marking Trafalgar Day: Burnet knew his subjects well and represented them individually in this panoramic work, celebrating their finest moment with lasses and children on Observatory Hill in 1832 as a frigate passing downriver fires a salute. There, a wee girl on his shoulder, is Joe Brown, captain of the foretop in Victory, while the grizzled ancient carving a beef joint is Frank Cowen, who was ashore with Cook at Hawaii. And there, beside him, is none other than a curly-haired Tom Allen. It is a lyrical piece, of a kind with romantic portrayals of the Sailor’s Return by Thomas Stothard.

What makes Burnet’s work remarkable, however, is that it was painted not for an admiral or official but the Duke of Wellington, who hung it at Apsley House as a companion to Chelsea Pensioners reading the Waterloo Dispatch by David Wilkie. The Iron Duke’s respect for Jack has been noted before. This tribute gave rise, moreover, to the only true portraits of our seamen. In preparing his canvas, Burnet painted nine pensioners. No satires these, but recognizable humans, thoughtfully presented. Thus they are brought to the modern eye, from a strong-featured (and surprisingly youthful-looking) Tom Allen, to a man known only as Joseph Miller, pensive, wise – a reflective face that has seen the world and everything in it, and is prepared for the end.

Those denied naval pensions faced a more whimsical fate, being thrown back onto the mercy of their parishes or local charities. Not all were quite what they appeared. Owen Roberts declared himself ‘born under an unlucky planet’ when he was sighted, on the streets of Liverpool in the 1820s, selling copies of a pamphlet about his seafaring life. The local press took up his cause, a man ‘in his 87th year, totally blind, and led about by his wife, nearly as aged as himself . . . a very interesting couple’. It was soon pointed out that Roberts was not exactly destitute, receiving 4s a week from the parish and a further 4s a week as an out-pensioner of the merchant sailor’s charity, the Seamen’s Hospital Society.28 Nor had he been unlucky, having survived no fewer than fourteen slaving voyages from Africa and two years in a French prison. Owen Roberts got by for another four years, to become that rarest of sea creatures: one who had been afloat for almost half a century – in men-of-war and privateers as well as slaveships – and lived into his nineties.²⁹

Prosperity in a lengthy era of peace enabled the nation to express its gratitude more practically through a range of charitable institutions. In the wake of ‘Bosun’ Smith’s Destitute Sailors’ Asylum and the Seamen’s Hospital Society, launched by Wilberforce’s campaigning, came the Sailor’s Home, founded by two evangelical naval captains, which opened in Stepney in 1835. Other Christian sponsors came forward until virtually every major port had a seamen’s refuge.30

For those still in naval service, a pension scheme was introduced in 1831 to replace the whimsical system of calculating and approving individual pensions. At sea, an easing of discipline was visible. Flogging round the fleet was abolished in 1824, and punishment became more regulated as the Admiralty responded to radical politicians like Joseph Hume, who decried a system that favoured the ‘arbitrary caprice of commanding officers’ over the rule of law. Use of the lash was reduced.³¹ The total number of naval hands flogged fell from 2,007 in 1839 to 860 seven years later.³²

Yet in one area, naval statute remained impervious to the age of reform. While the need for impressment had passed, and would not return in the long peace of the nineteenth century, successive governments averted their eyes from abolition, as if tampering with the past might threaten challenges from the future. Abolition, in fact, was an increasingly discomforting cry at Westminster – not in regards to slavery, which had been outlawed as a trade in British territories in 1807, but to impressment.

In a letter to William Wilberforce from Lloyd’s Coffee House in 1816, a seaman turned activist, Thomas Urquhart, related how during the war he and his wife, out walking in London, had been manhandled and beaten by a press gang before being rescued by passers-by. On taking their case up with the Lord Mayor, they were granted £50. Urquhart’s point, however, was to urge Wilberforce and other philanthropists ‘to act with the same ardour and zeal in the cause of British seamen’ as they had over slavery. He concluded: ‘The sufferers have a much stronger title than the African to your sympathy.’³³ (This may indeed have inspired Wilberforce to launch his charity for distressed hands.)

The cause was taken up in less challenging terms by a true seaman’s friend, Captain Anselm Griffiths, who had campaigned long and hard for reform and in 1826 published a treatise Impressment fully Considered with a View to its Gradual Abolition. After more than ten years of peace, he believed, the nation had forgotten its debt:

Remember that by carrying the war into every country, every clime, every quarter of the globe, they kept you free . . . Let us purchase their affection and freedom, and no longer have hundreds of these fine open-hearted fellows (for such they intrinsically are) skulking about during the impress, degraded as well as disguised.34

Lobbying by an MP, John Silk Buckingham, a former sailor himself, produced a motion for abolition in 1833, but even the Great Reform Act climate that year failed to secure its passage. Another old seaman, the actor Charles Pemberton, was beside himself, ‘sick and pale with the shame which every Englishman ought to feel’ and bitterly quoting Shakespeare: ‘This other Eden, demi-paradise.’³⁵ An elderly admiral returned fire at these ‘babbling blockheads’; if impressment were discontinued and seamen could not be ‘brought together instantly on the burst of war, there is nothing to prevent invasion’.³⁶

Though debate went on, press gangs had disappeared from the streets, never to return. The Royal Navy’s manning system, of ‘sign-on and discharge’, was gradually but also fundamentally affected by the coming of steam, and the requirement for smaller, more qualified crews. Tradition gave way finally in 1853 to the creation of a standing force of the Crown.³⁷

In the meantime, while comparisons with slavery were being trotted out again, it happened that Jack was fighting and dying once more – this time in the cause of suppressing that inhuman traffic. What one historian has called ‘the longest and hardest campaign the Royal Navy ever waged’, against the Atlantic slave trade, had reached a turning point.³⁸

* Thompson, pp. 293–4. Mayhew went on to co-found Punch magazine in 1841.